Abstract Book of the 3rd World Conference on Gender Equality
Year: 2025
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Potentials and Limitations of Gender-Neutral Language as a Form of Gender Identities’ Visibility and Equal Representation: A Corpus Approach per Text Genre
Vasiliki Chelidoni
ABSTRACT:
The paper entitled “Potentials and Limitations of Gender-Neutral Language as a Form of Gender Identities’ Visibility and Equal Representation: A Corpus Approach per Text Genre” presents the challenges of applying gender-neutral language strategies in different text genres. In brief, the adoption of collective, generic, and epicene terms as well as the use of plural neutral nouns and linguistic innovations, such as the singular “they” or the non-binary title “Mx” in English, and the new neutral pronoun “iel” in French, are explored through the compilation and processing of genre-specific EU parallel corpora consisting of web and legal texts respectively. These texts are extracted from EU official websites (i.e., the web texts from European Commission’s website and the legal ones from EUR-Lex database) in the examined EU official languages (e.g. en, fr). By exploiting the corpus management and text analysis software Sketch Engine to build and investigate the corpora mentioned above, the potentials and limitations of gender-neutral language strategies are revealed per text genre. In particular, gender identities’ visibility, as expressed through gender-neutral language, facilitates appeal to diverse social groups in web texts characterized by their function to persuade wider audiences, while provoking ambiguity in legal texts so as not to fulfill the EU legislation’s drafting requirement for clarity and precision. Finally, addressing these gender-neutral language issues based on different text genres’ parallel corpora allows for reflecting on and promoting equal linguistic representation of all genders.
Keywords: different text genres, equal linguistic representation, gender-neutral language strategies, parallel corpora, Sketch Engine